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GEORGE LUNT. 


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DELIVERED BEFORE THE 


MASSACHUSETTS HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY, 


DEDICATION OF HORTICULTURAL HALL, 


MAY 15, 1845. 


BY GEORGE LUNT. 


Boston: 
PRINTED BY DUTTON AND WENTWORTH. 
No. 37, Congress Street. 


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MASSACHUSETTS HORTICULTURAL SocrETY, 
Boston, May 17th, 1845. 


At a meeting of the Society, held this day, it was 


Voted, That the thanks of the Society be presented to the Hon. GEORGE LunT, of Newburyport, 


for the truly poetical and highly classical Address, delivered by him, on the occasion of the dedication of 
the New Hall of the Association. 


Voted, That Messrs. Isaac P. Davis, Josiah Bradlee, and Stephen Fairbanks be a Committee to solicit 
a copy for publication. 


Attest, 
EBENEZER WIGHT, Recording Secretary. 


BOSTON, MAY 207TH, 1845. 
Hon. Grorace Lunt, 


Dear Sir, 


The undersigned have the honor to communicate to you the annexed 
vote of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, requesting for publication, a copy of your Address, 
delivered on the evening of the 15th instant. 

In the performance of this pleasing duty, we gladly avail ourselves of the opportunity, to convey to 
you our personal satisfaction with the excellent and appropriate sentiments so eloquently expressed: 
and for the honor of the literature of our Country, and the good of the Society, which we represent, we 
trust you will readily consent to the promulgation of an Address of such rare merit. 


We are, with great esteem, 


Your friends and obedient servants, 


ISAAC P. DAVIS, 
JOSIAH BRADLEE, Committee. 
STEPHEN FAIRBANKS, 


NEWBURYPORT, MAY 21, 1845. 
Gentlemen,— 


With a grateful sense of your kind appreciation of my performance, whose merits, whatever they 


may be, must be attributed to my heartfelt interest in the subject, I have the honor to submit it entirely 
to your disposal. 


Tremain, gentlemen, 
With great respect, 
Truly your friend and servant, 
GEORGE LUNT. 
I, P. Davis, 


JOSIAMI BRADLEE, 
STEPHEN FAIRBANKS, ESQrs. 


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httos://archive.org/details/addressdeliveredOOlunt_0 


ADDRESS. 


Mr. PresipENT, AND GENTLEMEN OF THE SOCIETY : 


Ir is a touching, and to some of you, perhaps, familiar 
incident related of a celebrated English traveller,* whose 
genius and misfortunes have long closely allied him with 
every human sympathy. He was engaged upon his first 
adventurous enterprise into a distant and unknown land. 
He had penetrated the interior solitudes of Africa. He 
was in the midst of the vast deserts of a barbarous clime. 
He was hundreds of miles away from the very outskirts 
of civilization, and surrounded on every side by the beasts 
of the wilderness, and by men scarcely less ferocious. 
He had suffered every privation and every ill. He was 
alone in the dismal waste, with a worn and failing body 
and a sinking mind. It was while the chance of life 
appeared a thing almost too hopeless for conjecture, and 
a thousand natural emotions thronged upon his soul ; 
while the present seemed to crowd into its narrow hour 
the accumulated memories of all the past, and offered 
him but the prospect of a miserable death upon the bar- 
ren sands, for the home which he had left with such eager 
and buoyant expectations, and the loved and lovely things 
he was to behold no more; it was at this moment of 
despondency and distress, that an object caught his eye, 


SSieatic: 


6 


which, perhaps, from the heedless or the happy, would 
scarcely have attracted a passing glance. It was a small 
moss, of extraordinary beauty, in the process of germina- 
tion; and, as he contemplated the delicate conformation 
of its roots and leaves, the thought forced itself irresisti- 
bly upon his mind, that the same bountiful and eternal 
Providence, which protected this minute but lovely object 
in obscurity so complete, and in the region of perpetual 
barrenness, could not be unmindful of one of his intelli- 
gent beings, the highest in the order of intellectual crea- 
tion. It was the reflection thus suggested which banished 
his despair, and nerved his heart to those renewed efforts 
which secured his eventual return to his native land. 
There could be no more striking illustration than this 
of the benevolent order of the universe; which so often 
vindicates itself under circumstances apparently fortui- 
tous, by demonstrating the purpose and value of those 
things, whose utility a cold philosophy had endeavored to 
discover in vain. It were, indeed, too much to say, that 
the minutest atom which floats in infinite space, or the 
meanest flower that blows upon the bosom of nature, 
have been created for no valuable end. If the purposes 
of existence were less than they really are in the eye of 
reason and enlightened philosophy, we might have been 
sulijected to a very different constitution of external na- 
ture. To surround us merely with those things which 
might minister to our actual necessities, were to deprive 
our senses themselves of their very noblest attributes, and 
to contract within the narrowest limits the circle of our 
capacities and desires. 'T'ake from us, indeed, those love- 
ly manifestations of the external world; those sweet, and 
graceful and glorious things, which tend much more, per- 
haps, to the promotion of our present happiness, as well 
as to the perfection of our immortal destiny, than all 


7 


which the world counts most worthy of its pursuit,— 
and our minds were dark, and our hearts dead within us, 
instead of kindling with the glowing earth, as, radiant 
with brightness and beauty, she smiles to meet the em- 
braces of the returning Spring. 

The very savage, indeed, must derive some moral ele- 
vation from the contemplation of external nature. For 
his untutored soul, as well as for the mind of the most 
cultivated student of the works of creation, that orient 
pavilion, flushed with a thousand gorgeous and shifting 
hues, from out whose dazzling portals issue the outgoings 
of the morning; the deepened. loveliness of that softer 
heaven, which ushers universal nature to repose; the 
changing year, as its advancing seasons ripen into mel- 
lower beauty ;—yes, all and each, within the rudest re- 
cesses of the primeval wilderness as well as amidst the 
refinements of a more polished taste, in their turn have 
given wing to a sublimer imagination, widened the sphere 
of intellectual exertion, and dignified the reflections and 
aspirations of the moral being. 'The Indian maiden, who 
decks her jetty tresses with the wild flowers plucked by 
the margin of the forest brook, drinks in from them the 
same images of grace, fragility and beauty, which they 
are fitted to inspire in the proudest bosom that beats in 
regal halls; where every silken tint that art has curiously 
embroidered, and every radiant gleam that glitters from 
clustered gems, were incomplete without these simpler 
charms, furnished by the cheap provision of nature, yet 
more resplendent in their freshness than the array of Solo- 
mon in all his glory! 

But if such be the universal influence of natural beau- 
ty ; if over even the soul of a barbarian it exerts this in- 
wrought power to charm the imagination and elevate the 
mind; surely, amidst the hourly cares which, in more 


8 


civilized life, press upon the hearts of men, they can find 
no relief so easily attained, and, at the same time, so re- 
freshing and salutary, as the contemplation of those lovely 
things, which our common mother. for the common use 
and entertainment of her children, hangs sparkling with 
dew-drops upon every tree, or flings with bounteous pro- 
fusion over her luxuriant bosom. 

Whoever enters upon the attentive examination of these 
objects, in the spirit of rational philosophy, will be certain 
to attain a reward at least commensurate with his exer- 
tions ; for if it acquire him no other possession, it will at 
least bring him that priceless one of an innocent heart 
and a gentle mind; and a student of nature, who should 
become sensual and debased, would present as strange an 
anomaly as an undevout astronomer. 

‘The human mind itself is indeed deeply imbued with 
the spirit of love for natural beauty. Perhaps there is no 
one who has so entirely lost the impress originally stamped. 
by the hand of God upon the soul of man,—no one who 
is so thoroughly ‘‘ of the earth, earthy,” as to have lost 
all conscious enjoyment of the glorious creation around 
him, crowned by every revolving season with its own 
peculiar magnificence and beauty. Of the tendency of 
many of the great pursuits of life, when they are modi- 
fied by no controlling influence, to render us sordid and 
selfish, there can exist no doubt. ‘The very refinements 
of existence corrupt as well as polish. ‘The human char- 
acter insensibly dwindles amidst the pursuits of civilized 
society. ‘The range of our feelings becomes contracted 
under the weight of the conventionalisms of life. The 
sphere of thought itself grows narrower in the plodding 
routine of daily occupations. Confined amongst the ways 
and thoroughfares of populous existence, and man. be- 
comes almost necessarily assimilated, in thought and 


9 


habit, to those with whom he is associated. He conforms, 
and, perhaps, degrades his being, by conformity with the 
settled maxims and theories around him; and often, 


Like a drop of water, 
That in the ocean seeks another drop,— 
confounds himself, and loses the identity of his own pecu- 
liar, and perhaps nobler characteristics. 

Consider, then, the mother of the seasons in some of 
her infinite manifestations. You wander into the fresh 
fields and gather the flowers of spring. In crystal vases, 
resting, it may be, upon sculptured marble, you cherish 
these frail children of the sun and showers. You renew 
them before they wither, and gaze with exquisite delight 
upon their delicate texture and the manifold perfection of 
their hues. They appeal forever to your inmost heart, as 
silent mementos of all things sweet, and beautiful, and 
pure. ‘They are eloquent of perpetual suggestions to the 
answering soul. ‘They fill your mind more than all that 
lives upon the canvass of the mightiest master. The 
least and meanest of them all more satisfies your imagi- 
nation than the choicest statue wrought by the divinest 
hand. ‘To your cultivated mind they address themselves 
in their momentary beauty, like images of things more 
perfect in immortal loveliness. ‘They are emblems of the 
affinities of your moral being with whatever is complete 
in infinite glory beyond the skies. Like the eternal stars, 
that, on the brow of midnight, assure us, with their un- 
speakable effulgence, that Heaven and its hopes are yet 
there, so these, the stars of earth, spring upon her verdant 
bosom, the mute memorials of an inscrutable immortality. 
In the humble dwelling-place of the poorest laborer, in 
some crowded city’s dim alley, into which the golden 
light of day pours scarcely one beam of all his abounding 
flood, you may often discern some simple flower, which 

2 


10 


indicates the longing of our more spiritual being; which 
recalls to the mind’s eye of the wearied man the green 
fields of his boyish days, and impresses him again and 
again,—oh, not in vain!—with the gentler and purer 
emotions of his childhood. 'They come upon him, amidst 
the dust and heat, and perhaps the wretchedness, of his 
daily lot, like outward manifestations of the inner spirit- 
world. They are the signals of thoughts 


Commercing with the skies. 


They are like gleams of a fairer and brighter sunshine, 
from realms ‘“‘ beyond the visible diurnal sphere.” 

The time does, indeed, come to all men, when they 
would gladly escape from the crowd and confusion of 
common life, and 


Forth issuing on a summer’s morn, to breathe 
Among the pleasant villages and farms, 


would forget the thronging cares which have exhausted 
their hearts, in company with the lilies of the field, that 
toil not, nerther do they spin. It is, indeed, by influences 
such as these that we acquire not only fresher impulses to 
duty, but far higher and nobler principles of action. Ex- 
perience, it is true, teaches us that the mere drudgery of 
rural pursuits can have little effect in raising the private 
or social condition of the man. ‘To turn the verdant soil 
for the mere sustenance of life, would as little impress his 
mind with the true sentiment of his occupation, as the 
gloomy grandeur of ocean enters into the soul of the tem- 
pest-tost and weather-worn mariner. The rustic laborer 
might forever follow his plough upon the mountain side, 
and trample with heedless foot upon the brightest flowers, 
that appealed with dewy eyes in vain to his plodding 
sensibilities ; and the village maiden, obeying those truer 
and nobler instincts, inseparable, I believe, from every 


11 


woman’s heart, with every returning Spring, might gather 
and weave them into her rustic coronal. But to fulfil 
their highest ministry they must have become blended 
with their kindred associations. They must have linked 
themselves, as they have done, with the domestic, and 
public and religious story of the world. ‘Their sweet and 
gentle names must have floated upon the voice of song. 
They must have given language of eloquent significance 
to the passionate impulses of the human heart. They 
must have spoken of the fragility of life under that 
sweetest and most soothing of all sad similitudes,—“ a 
fading flower.’ ‘They must have crowned the wine- 
cup amidst the revels of ‘‘ towered cities,’ and mingled 
with the sunny locks of the queen of May upon the vil- 
lage green. They must have waved upon the brow of 
the returning victor, wreathed their modest tints amongst 
the tresses of the blushing bride, and reposed in pale and 
tranquil beauty upon the marble bosom of death. They 
must have proved their power to sound the secret well- 
springs of our hearts, and to draw up the sweeter waters 
beneath, hidden, as with a veil, by the intertangled sophis- 
tications and falsehoods of the world. They must have 
been won from their wild and unseen solitudes, and nur- 
tured and cherished with a dear and reverent love. 

But much as we love to meet them in their green re- 
treats, on the fragrant meadow, by the rural road-side, or 
in the wild recesses of the rocks, it is as the friends and 
companions of our daily duties that we most welcome 
their sweet and holy ministry. Nurtured by our own 
hands, they become indeed the faithful solace of our cares, 
and the rich reward of all our pleasant toil. And then 
how more than strange is this wonderful result with 
which beneficent Nature repays our fostering charge ! 
What miracle so marvellous, as this mysterious develop- 


12 


ment, which we so disregard, because we call it the com- 
mon course and order of creation! When the returning 
season fills our hearts anew with its returning hopes, we 
take the unsightly and insignificant seed. We bury it 
out of our sight beneath the dark, insensate earth. ‘The 
dews and the showers fall upon what might well seem to 
be its eternal bed. ‘The sun reaches its secret resting 
place with a vital and incomprehensible energy. It awa- 
kens from its slumber, and no apparent elements of its 
original conformation remain. It starts into being under 
newer and ever-varying aspects,—till 


from the root 
Springs lighter the green stalk, from thence the leaves 
More aery, last the bright consummate flower 
Spirits odorous breathes. Par. Lost. 


And then, what human philosophy is competent to ex- 
plain the unseen cause, which, from elements apparently 
so inadequate, brings up the slender and tapering stalk, 
shoots forth the verdant leaf, and embellishes its lustrous 
crown with inimitable purple, or the flowering gold! 
What wonderful chemistry is this, which so filters the 
moisture of the earth and the dew of heaven, and com- 
bines and diffuses the just proportions of the vital air 
through every intricate fibre, till it blushes in the bloom 
of the queenly Rose, and makes the virgin Lily the em- 
blem of purity and light! With what unerring skill 
they are blended or contrasted in their infinite variety of 
‘quaint enamelled dyes’! With what exquisite order 
and precision their gorgeous retinue appears, each at its 
accustomed season, and gathers the successive harvest of 
its transient glory ! 

Daffodils, 


That come before the swallow dares, and take 
The winds of March with beauty ; violets dim 


13 


But sweeter than the lids of Juno’s eyes 

Or Cytherea’s breath ; pale primroses, 

That die unmarried ere they can behold 

Bright Phcebus in his strength; * * 

be vi = bold oxlips, and 

The crown-imperial ; lilies of all kinds, 

The flower-de-luce being one. WINTER’s TALE. 


Of all the gentle and welcome company, not one but lifts 
its starry cup or hangs its clustering bells upon the spiral 
stem. And oh, still stranger transformation, when this 
treasured darling of an hour, so rich in glowing charms 
and fragrant with delicious sweetness, yields to the immut- 
able law of its destiny; refolds the vital principle of its 
being within the shapeless and scentless husk, and flings 
itself once more to its wonted repose in the embraces of 
the fulfilling earth ! 

It were, perhaps, too much to allege that for our use 
and pleasure alone were created these loveliest objects of 
the natura] world, so curious in contrivance, so matchless 
in surpassing beauty, so eloquent in the lessons of uner- 
ring wisdom. Of the original inevitable relation between 
things beautiful and things morally good, we may form 
some not irrational conjecture. ‘That they are sadly dis- 
joined, under our present condition, we well know. But 
if, as we are told, 


Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth, 
Unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep— Par. Lost. 


it were not unreasonable to conclude, that, to their celes- 
tial apprehension, the lovely aspects of creation may afford 
a delight commensurate with the primal relations between 
all things in themselves excellent; that to them, as to the 
Infinite Author, the loveliness of creation may seem very 
good. Nor are we capable of understanding how far the 
inferior orders of being are susceptible of enjoyment from 
the same sources with ourselves. ‘That their organs are 


14 


affected to some extent by the same sights, as well as 
sounds, which address themselves to our own sensations, 
and that they do appreciate some of the properties of the 
vegetable world, we have the most abundant evidence. 
That the ‘‘ grazed ox’’ would trample, in the fragrant 
meadow, upon the springing blossoms, that fiil the soul 
of the merest child with irrepressible delight, is no less 
true, than that the bee lingers upon the flowery bank, in 
pursuit of his sweet repast, or that the wild bird trills his 
spontaneous song where dews are brightest, amongst 
leaves and flowers. Yet we may be sure, that to us 
alone of the common dwellers upon earth is given the 
power of justly appreciating these munificent gifts of the 
benevolent Author of all things. ‘To us alone has been 
afforded the faculty of deriving the most innocent enjoy- 
ment from their cultivation and care; and, since the first 
habitation assigned to our common parents was indeed a 
Paradise,* we may conclude, that in the indulgence of no 
other of our pleasures do we so nearly approach their 
happy and sinless state. 

There can be, indeed, scarcely a change more striking 
than to leave the noisy streets of the ‘‘dim and treeless 
town” for the pleasant garden, stretching away under the 
broad delicious sunshine, in the bright and open air. Of 
all the ordinary vicissitudes of life, | am aware of none 
which involves a revolution so absolute. We quit the 
sights which offend us at every turn, and enter upon a 
scene affluent in all things, which please the eye and re- 
fresh the imagination. Instead of the tumult and intem- 
perate haste of the crowded haunts of men, we rest with 
the repose of nature, broken only by murmurs that are 
delicious, and the warbled music of the skies. For the 
suffocating steam of crowded life, we inhale ineffable per- 


* TIAPA'AEIZO%, a garden. 


15 


fumes, that float upon the breath of flowers. We forget 
the debasing competitions of wealth and fame, and enter 
into the innocent pursuits of the guileless creatures of the 
air. Instead of the too often profitless companionships of 
society, we meet ourselves. We become the companions 
of our own inner thoughts, and the things which inter- 
vene between our hearts and heaven are those which only 
link us more closely to its infinite aspirations. ‘That 
voice within speaks to us like a trumpet, whose whis- 
pers were almost inaudible through the tumult and hurry 
of life. The heart which was harder than the nether 
millstone in the cave of Plutus, softens and expands to 
the just proportions of its nature, beneath the liberal sun- 
shine and under the broad and bounteous atmosphere. 
And still, like that primal Eden, though shorn and dimin- 
ished of those heavenly flowers, 


That never will in other climate grow, 


it is yet the faint image of the original paradise, and the 
only earthly region instinctive with the spirit of an Al- 
mighty and universal Love. It is here, indeed, that 


* = o’er the flower 
His eye is sparkling and his breath hath blown, 
His soft and summer breath, whose tender power 
Passes the strength of storms in their most desolate hour. 


A populous solitude of bees and birds 

And fairy-form’d and many-colored things, 

Who worship him with notes more sweet than words, 

And innocently open their glad wings, 

Fearless and full of life ; the gush of springs, 

And fall of lofty fountains, and the bend 

Of stirring branches, and the bud which brings 

The swiftest thought of beauty, here extend, 

Mingling, and made by Love, unto one mighty end. Byron. 


It is from places like these that the benefactors of the 
world have derived the strength of their generous impul- 


16 


ses. It is here that statesmen, and poets and philosophers 
have retired, and moulded those divine conceptions which 
have resulted in the advancement and elevation of man- 
kind. It was upon such a retreat that that noblest Ro- 
man,* styled by onet ‘‘the most wise, most worthy, 
most happy and the greatest of all mankind,” entered 
after he had made his native city the mistress of the 
world. In that venerated solitude, to which many a pil- 
grim step turned in the succeeding ages of his country’s 
history, wiser than he who, in later times, 


Exchanged an empire for a cell,— 


he forgot alike his glories and their cares, and conceived 
that illustrious sentiment, which could never have arisen 
in an ignoble or ambitious mind, Nunquam minus solus 
quam cum solus. Fyrom the rose-beds of Pestum, rich 
in the bloom of their double harvest,[ was wafted that 
breath of flowers, which ages ago stirred and mingled 
with the sublimest of human emotions in ‘“ Rome’s least 
mortal mind :” from that Pestum, whose fragrant odors 
yet faint upon the summer gale, amidst the ruins of 
man’s less durable achievements; that Pestum, where 
still 


The air is sweet with violets, running wild 

Mid broken pieces and fallen capitals ; 

Sweet as when Tully, writing down his thoughts, 

Those thoughts so precious and so lately lost, 

(Turning to thee, divine philosophy, 

Ever at hand to calm his troubled soul,) 

Sailed slowly by two thousand years ago, 

For Athens ; when a ship, if northeast winds 

Blew from the Pestan gardens, slacked her course. RoGERS. 


We have read, with ennobling emotions, in our school- 
boy days, of the reluctance with which the royal gardener 


* Scipio. t Cowley. 
t Biferique rosaria Pesti—VIRG. 


17 


of Sidon* left his pleasing toils, for the purpose of assum- 
ing the burdensome cares of state. And it was from such 
a scene that Horace might well have refused to part, to 
enjoy the more intimate companionship of the master of 
the world; especially as it must have been alloyed with 
the society of that proud but degenerate capital, to which 
Jugurtha, not long before, had bidden farewell in lan- 
guage less flattering than severe: ‘‘ Farewell, O cruel 
and venal city, which requirest only a purchaser in order 
to sell thyself and all which thou dost contain.”? And it 
was in the shades of those Salonian gardens, which his 
own hands had made, that Dioclesian, the emperor, re- 
ceived the ambassadors, who vainly strove to reinvest his 
brows with 


the hollow crown 
That rounds the mortal temples of a king. 


But perhaps one of the finest natural illustrations of the 
interest which still clings to pursuits like these, long after 
the heart is comparatively dead to all other human cares, 
is to be found in the pages of the great novelist, whose 
pictures appear to us less like efforts of imagination, than 
delineations of nature herself in her invariable aspects. 
The venerable Abbot of St. Mary’s, according to the tenor 
of the tale, formed apparently for times less troublous 
than those which then distracted his unhappy country, 
resigns to a bolder spirit his conspicuous post in the van 
of the armies of the church, now become literally and 
carnally militant. He betakes himself, with cheerful res- 
ignation, to the horticultural occupations of his earlier 
and happier days. But his present pursuits and his former 
condition and character necessarily involve him in the 
plots and counterplots formed for the liberation of that 


* Abdolonymus. 


OO 


18 


fairest flower of Scotland’s beauty, whose uttered name 
has so long awakened, and will forever awaken, every 
romantic emotion in the human bosom; of that lovely 
Mary, less a queen than a woman, whose melancholy 
story, after the lapse of nearly three centuries, so stirs 
the heart that all seems harsh and cruel, which sullen 
history would dare to blend with the memory of her 
beauty and her wrongs. Yet in spite of her loveliness 
and misfortunes, the pious and transmuted Abbot, strick- 
en, it is true, somewhat into the vale of years, struggles 
hard between his allegiance to his queen, consecrated, as 
it is, by his duty and devotion to the church, and his 
affection for his garden-plots, which the rude feet of mes- 
sengers and soldiers might trample; for his fruits and his 
flowers,—his bergamots, his jessamines and his clove- 
gilliflowers. Let queens escape from prison, or kingdoms 
pass away, so the season returns in its freshness to his 
more intimate domain. ‘‘Ay, ruin follows us every where,”’ 
said he, ‘‘a weary life I have had for one to whom peace 
was ever the dearest blessing. * * I could be sorry for 
that poor queen, but what avail earthly sorrows to a man 
of fourscore ?—and it is a rare dropping morning for the 
early colewort.”’* 

I know, indeed, of no picture more cheering than that 
of old age, which the world, if it has robbed it of all 
things else, has been unable to cheat of its relish for these 
innocent pleasures. ‘There is nothing to rival it, unless it 
be the unalloyed delight of children in the midst of a gar- 
den. How eagerly they scamper along the walks, and 
stoop over the brightening beds! At the very approach 
of spring their hearts are bounding as at some unheard-of 
joy. To them, the golden hours of summer are laden with 


* The Abbot, Vol. II. 


19 


a rapture unknown to later years. With what exquisite 
enjoyment they enter upon the minutest examination of 
the most common things! The flowers that are their 
own make them rich with an almost untold wealth. The 
springing grass to them is like the verdure of a fairy cre- 
ation, and every bud a miracle in their soft and earnest 
eyes, 

And then what a host of illustrious names throng upon 
our memories, and seem to sanctify these pleasant and 
quiet scenes. I speak not now so much of the poets, who 
have been forever the chosen interpreters of nature’s mys- 
teries, and wanting whom, she might forever have uttered 
oracles, sounding to the wise, but vague and indefinite to 
the general apprehension. But the time would fail me to 
tell the great and illustrious names of English history, 
blended with every memory of these endearing pursuits : 
of Wolsey, magnificent in all his enterprises; of Sidney, 
conceiving the delicious dreams of ‘ Arcadia,” in his 
ancestral bowers at Penshurst; of Wotton, flattering the 
Virgin Queen with his present of orange trees from Italy, 
still flourishing in their original perfection; of Temple, 
whose heart so clung to the delightful recreations of his 
leisure hours that he directed, by his will, that heart itself 
to be buried beneath the sun-dial in his garden; of Eve- 
lyn, whose very name awakens every pleasing association 
connected with rural pursuits, and whose noble sentences 
are full of the heart and soul of one, who loved the soil 
that bore him, with every emotion becoming a patriot and 
aman; of Raleigh, the graceful and gallant, learned and 
brave; of Bacon, in the language of Cowley, 


Whom a wise king and Nature chose 
Lord Chancellor of both their laws ; 


of that Bacon, who would have fresh flowers upon his table 


20 


while he sounded the depths of divine and human philos- 
ophy ; of Addison, the regenerator of a more manly taste 
in gardening as well as literature; of Locke, the child- 
like philosopher, exchanging his researches amongst the 
labyrinths of the human mind for studies on a fairer page, 
the open book of Nature, in her 


hues, 
Her forms, and in the spirit of her forms, 


and who, unlike that illustrious Roman, to whom I have 
referred, loved the society of children rather than perfect 
solitude ; of Cowley and Pope, Walpole, Shenstone and 
Cowper, and a hundred others, who have illustrated this 
subject by their genius, and who are dear to us by every 
kindred tie which connects us with the memorials of the 
mind ; of Newton, conceiving, from a natural phenome- 
non in his garden, of the mighty law which balances this 
solid earth amidst the unshaken spheres; or of Fox, turn- 
ing without a sigh from that great assembly which he 
had so often controlled by his sagacious eloquence, and 
finding amidst his flowers and trees, at St. Anne’s Hill, a 
happiness far more real, than during the long years, when 
he had been the idol of popular supremacy, or for the 
brief but dazzling hour, when, having finally grasped the 
prize of a life-long ambition, he directed the destinies of 
millions of his fellow men. 

And oh, what glory and delight have the poets flung 
around these delicious resting-places of the soul! from 
the time of the wise and royal poet of Israel, who tells us, 
‘‘T made me gardens and orchards, and I planted in them 
trees of all kind of fruits ;”* from the father of Grecian 
minstrelsy, revelling in fancy in the gardens of Alcinous, 
and the master of the Roman lyre, learned in all the sci- 


* Ecclesiastes. 


21 


ence of the generous pursuit; from the sylvan shades of 
Arqua, and every ‘‘bosky bourne”? which Boccacio so 
exquisitely delineates, down to the grottoes and flower- 
beds of 'T'wickenham, and the almost sacred solitudes of 
Olney. With what a charm the imagination insensibly 
clothes the passage of those golden hours, 


When Jonson sat in Drummond’s classic shade ! 


What tree of our own planting is more familiar to us than 
Pope’s willow, or Shakspeare’s mulberry, set by himself 
in his garden at New Place? And we have all of us, I 
trust, devoutly execrated the barbarous hand, which so 
recently despoiled this tree of trees, which, but for such 
sacrilege, might have been visited by our children’s chil- 
dren. And when we read, in one of the early biographies 
of Milton, that ‘‘a pretty garden-house he took in Alders- 
gate street, at the end of an entry, and therefore the fitter 
for his turn, by the reason of the privacy, besides that 
there were few streets in London more free from noise 
than that;’”’** we may well believe that there, rather than 
in the shock of life, his serene imagination might lavish 
all its riches amongst the flowery groves of Paradise. Yes! 
it is the true poets who are with us, not only when the 
sunshine nestles upon the mossy bank or beds of violets, 
but who come to us alike when Nature herself is sad 
and silent, and at the wintry fireside, pour the joy of 
summer into our longing hearts. It is they who have 
embroidered the virgin page with inwrought words of 
every curious hue,— 


Of sable grave, 
Fresh green, and pleasant yellow, red most brave, 
And constant blue, rich purple, guiltless white, 
The lowly russet, and the scarlet bright ; 


* Phillips. 


2a 


Branched and embroidered like the painted spring ; 

Each leaf match’d with a flower, and each string 

Of golden wire ; ” ‘ ss 

is * There seem to sing the choice 

Birds of a foreign note and various voice ; 

Here hangs a mossy rock ; there plays a fair 

But chiding fountain purled ; not the air 

Nor clouds, nor thunder, but are living drawn ; 

Not out of common tiffany or lawn, 

But fine materials which the muses know, 

And only know the countries where they grow. 
ATTRIBUTED TO GEORGE CHAPMAN. 


Without these glorious hues and forms, indeed, I know 
not of what materials the literature of a nation could be 
composed. And thus it is, that from the earliest age, and 
amongst every people, their beauty and the spirit of their 
beauty have haunted the soul of song. We know that in 
all the countries of the East, flowers have forever consti- 
tuted the symbols of sentiment and affection. The Greeks, 
who appear to me, by no means, deficient in that element 
of the romantic which the moderns are so ready to arro- 
gate entirely to themselves, were passionate in their love 
of flowers. From them have descended to us the custom 
of their employment in triumphal pageants, and on occa- 
sions of joyful or mournful ceremony; and they had 
scarcely a familiar flower, of the garden or the field, 
which their imagination had not woven into some lovely 
legend, or made the subject of some fanciful metamorpho- 
sis. By that most poetical of all people, the Hebrews, 
they were employed as the vehicles of many a touching 
and beautiful similitude. Of all the gorgeous company, 
there are none so familiar to our tongues and hearts, as 
the two which they have most distinguished with their 
affectionate admiration. How the spirit of devotion itself 
appears to spring at the very mention of the familiar 
names of things so beautiful and pure ! 


23 


By cool Siloam’s shady rill 
How sweet the Lily blows ; 
How sweet the breath, beneath the hill, 
Of Sharon’s dewy Rose! HEBER. 


I have thus endeavored, gentlemen, to discourse to you 
in a manner, let me hope, not entirely inconsistent with 
the spirit of the occasion. It has been my purpose to 
avoid that course of technical remark, which, before such 
an audience, might have proved presumptuous in me 
rather than instructive to you. ‘That scientific knowl- 
edge, which the genius and enterprise of modern times 
have brought to the pursuit of your liberal objects, may 
be found in sources easily accessible. Of the dignity and 
value of these objects it were unnecessary to speak. 'T'o 
apply any elaborate eulogium to this pursuit were as rea- 
sonable as to justify the great sun of Heaven himself, in 
the fullness and glory of his illustrious beams. The 
beautiful and costly edifice which you have erected is 
the most fitting testimonial of your liberality, as its pur- 
pose affords the surest evidence of a refined and intel- 
lectual community. ‘‘God Almighty,” says Lord Bacon, 
“first planted a garden; and indeed it is the purest of 
human pleasures; it is the greatest refreshment to the 
spirits of man; without which buildings and palaces are. 
but gross handy-works; and a man shall ever see, that, 
when ages grow to civility and elegancy, men come to 
build stately, sooner than to garden finely; as if garden- 
ing were the greater perfection.” 

There can be, indeed, no question whatever that Horti- 
culture, as a scientific pursuit, is of very recent date. 
The most famous gardens of antiquity, we may be sure, 
could enter into no sort of comparison with those, which 
would now be considered as exhibiting the most moderate 
pretensions, in point of the variety and beauty of their 


24 


productions. The hanging gardens of Semiramis have 
been accounted amongst the wonders of the world. Yet 
nothing can be more certain than that the ‘‘ Beauty of the 
Chaldee’s excellency” could afford the royal mistress of 
Assyria not a single nosegay to be compared with the 
meanest of those, which constantly grace your elegant and 
spirited exhibitions. Were it not for the apparent neces- 
sity of the case, arising from the absence of intercommu- 
nication between different people, it would be unaccount- 
able how little progress was made, for long ages, in an 
art so eminently attractive in itself, and so universally 
interesting to mankind. It is true, that conquerors, at all 
periods of time, have traversed vast portions of the world. 
But, with the exception of the emperor Napoleon, the 
pursuits of science, or the advancement of society, have 
rarely entered into their schemes of personal or national 
agerandizement. But what vast improvements in this, as 
in other respects, have resulted from the extending com- 
merce of the world! Of all the countless profusion of 
fruits and vegetables which make the fertile face of Eng- 
land ‘‘as the garden of the Lord,” those indigenous to her 
soil are of the most insignificant description. Few even 
of those sweetest flowers, which her later poets have 
woven into many a golden song, are of her own original 
production. ‘The oak, and some of the more common 
forest trees, were all that her Druid groves could boast. 
The very mulberry of Shakspeare was, in his day, a rare 
exotic, and one of a large importation procured from the 
continent by King James, in 1606. And if, as we are told, 
in the times of Henry VII, apples were sold at one and 
two shillings each, the red ones bringing the best price, 
we may conclude, that when Justice Shallow treated Fal- 
staff to a last year’s pippin of his own graffing, it might 
be an entertainment, at least, commensurate with the dig- 
nity of such a guest. 


25 


It has been recently stated, that the average value of 
the plants in a single horticultural establishment of Lon- 
don, is estimated at a million of dollars. And oh, before 
this magnificent result had been reached, from the com- 
paratively trifling beginning, of a few centuries ago, what 
infinite care and cost must have been expended; what 
love for the generous science must have been fostered and 
encouraged; what distant and unknown regions had been 
visited and rifled of the glories of the plains and woods! 
From solitary Lybian wastes and those paradises of Per- 
sia, the Land of Roses, so eloquently described by Xeno- 
phon; from 


Isles that crown th’ A“gean deep, 


to the boundless expanse of this bright heritage of ours: 
from T'artarian deserts to prairies of perpetual bloom; 
from the fertile breadth of fields, beneath the southern 
skies, to the strange continents of foreign seas and verdant 
islands of the ocean, 


: * * whose lonely race 


Resign the setting sun to Indian worlds. 


Combined with this adventurous spirit of modern dis- 
covery, 1s another principle, which has proved eminently 
favorable to the interests of horticultural science. The 
higher social condition of those softer companions of our 
garden-walks and labors and gentle cares; the more 
liberal position awarded them, under the influence of 
advancing civilization ; our deeper interest in their moral 
and intellectual culture, and our more generous regard for 
their innocent gratification, have interwoven a thousand 
graces and refinements, once unknown, amongst the 
coarser texture of social life. Never, indeed, do they 
enter so intimately into our joys, and griefs, and affec- 

4 


26 


tions, as in gardens and amongst flowers. For them, 
and not for ourselves, we reclaim the scattered blossoms 
along the wildernesses of Nature; we ask of them a more 
tasteful care in the cultivation of their beauties, and for 
their pleasure and adornment, we mingle their glorious 
hues into innumerable shapes of grace and loveliness. 

Welcome, then, for this, if for no other cause, the Hall 
which you have thus prepared, and decorated and gar- 
landed with the choicest treasures of the Spring. Long, 
long may it stand, an evidence of no vain or idolatrous 
worship. Unlike those grosser handiworks of cold and 
glittering marble, which crowned, in ancient days, the 
barren cliff, or looked, in lifeless beauty, 


Far out into the melancholy main,— 


but touched with the spirit of every gentle and noble 
association, and consecrated by the soul of all our dearest 
affections, welcome, to them and to us, be this Temple of 
the Fruits and Flowers. 


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